Brooklyn-Bred Joe Torre steers the Yankees to a world championship, overcoming personnel troubles and personal trauma.

Torre remembers his first meeting with Ali. "It was a Sunday
night, August 23, 1981. I was still managing the Mets. I wasn't in the
mood to strike up new relationships, but she was very striking. Bob
Gibson was pushing me, and I decided to ask her to lunch. The rest, as
they say, is history.

"She's a very unselfish person; she wants what I want, wants me to
be happy. When we were dating we'd go around and I'd see a piece of
art and say, 'I like that.' She'd say, 'That's nice, get it for
yourself. ' I'd say it was expensive and she'd say, 'You deserve it.'
That's how our existence has been: 'You deserve it.'"

In 1990 Torre was back with the Cardinals, beginning a six-year
run with a team that had already passed its prime. In the 1980s, the
Cards reached the World Series three times. But during Torre's tenure
they won 351 and lost 354, a lackluster .498 percentage. The result? A
third firing. Entering this past year with the Yankees, Torre had been
a manager for all or part of 14 seasons, posting an unimpressive
ledger of 894 wins and 1,003 losses.

Not exactly the kind of numbers that New York headline writers
would cotton to. Many of the media felt that Steinbrenner had forced
out Buck Showalter, a manager who in just his fourth year had
established himself as one of the best prepared in the game, a man who
knew the strengths and weaknesses of opposing players inside and
out. Showalter had brought the Yankees to the postseason in 1995 for
the first time in 14 years. The preceding year, he had them in first
place in the Eastern Division when the players strike wiped out the
season in August. It seemed to many that in exchange for the
39-year-old Showalter, the Yankees were getting a retread and National
League lifer. No doubt Torre had heard of Steinbrenner's reputation
and the ever-changing managerial nameplates.

"I got through that early," Torre recalls. "All the questions
about Buck Showalter--and he's a good manager--but hell, I took over
for Whitey 'the White Rat' Herzog in St. Louis!" A headline in the New
York Daily News read "Clueless Joe," implying that this poor, nice guy
didn't know what he was getting into by taking up residence in "The
Bronx Zoo." Torre shrugs. "What could George do to me that hadn't
already been done? I'd been fired three times before!"

So when Torre was given a two-year, $500,000-per-year contract on
Nov. 2, 1995 (earlier this year he received a two-year extension, for
$1 million per year) and faced the press shortly after, he wasn't
hunched over with trepidation. He sounded as earnest as a detective on
a promising trail. "There's a missing piece to my puzzle," he
said. "I've managed more than a dozen years, I've played with a few
ballclubs, I've had good years and bad years. I have never been in a
World Series, and coming to an organization that has the burning
desire to win was very important in making my decision." He would
pilot the most prestigious franchise in the history of sports.

Torre had grown up a New York Giants baseball fan in the 1940s and
'50s when the Yankees consistently ravaged the earth. Their clockwork
manner of beating up on other teams even led to a Broadway play, Damn
Yankees. "You always respected the Yankees because they always won,"
Torre recalls. "I remember the first time I faced the Yankees as a
20-year-old kid with the Braves in spring training. All of a sudden,
Mickey Mantle comes into the batter's box. It was quite an emotional
day for me, realizing I watched this guy on television all those years
and when I went out to the World Series in '57 and '58. And here he is
up at bat and I'm calling the pitches." He nods. "It got my
attention."

Despite his memories of those "damn Yankees," Torre's 1996 Yankees
were more than a little unsettled come spring training. Lefty Jimmie
Key was coming off rotator cuff surgery and Dwight Gooden was fighting
his way back from a two-year drug suspension. He had pitched just 41
innings since 1994. Kenny Rodgers, a $20 million free agent, began the
season poorly, keeping to himself an injury sustained after he took a
line drive off his pitching shoulder in spring training. The starting
pitching was full of enough maybes, hopes and prayers to start an
infirmary. The only known quantities were Andy Pettite and David Cone.

Still, Torre viewed the situation as half full rather than half
empty. "It's the best pitching I ever had as a manager," he
proclaimed. He thought the rest of the lineup also held promise. "When
I came to spring training I looked around and I've got Tino Martinez
at first, [Mariano] Duncan at second, [Wade] Boggs at third, Girardi
behind the plate. O'Neill, [Bernie] Williams and [Tim] Raines in the
outfield have all had postseason experience, and I didn't even go into
the pitching staff. If I compare it to the previous club I was with,
the Cardinals, maybe one or two guys had been in postseason play. It
made a big difference. You know what it's like, you stay hungry enough
that you want to go back there and do it, and maybe a little bit more
and maybe stay in the postseason a little bit longer."

Anyone believing in signs found one on opening day at Yankee
Stadium. Andy Pettite beat the Kansas City Royals in a snowstorm. "I
knew it was going to be a strange year," right fielder O'Neill said,
"when I saw Santa Claus in the front row."

Other early season signs were hardly propitious. The Orioles ran
out to an 11-2 record. Their sluggers were launching missiles out of
the world's largest phone booth, Camden Yards. Baseballs were
threatening to land at the door of Babe Ruth's birthplace several
blocks away.

Adding to the early pitching problems of Gooden, Key and Rodgers
was the weak hitting of first baseman Tino Martinez, who was batting
just .240 on May 17. Martinez had replaced fan favorite Don Mattingly,
a retiree after the 1995 playoffs. Mattingly had been a fixture at
first base, a nine-time Gold Glove winner. He had won a batting title,
an MVP award and was the best hitter in baseball from 1984 through
1988. Because he played through back pain, fans overlooked his
declining offense. He was a throwback, a "real Yankee." He showed up,
avoided scandal and played with intensity. The last memory he gave New
York fans was a .417 postseason average against Seattle in the 1995
Division Series, the highest on the team.

The Yankees began a series of miraculous sweeps even before summer
arrived. In Baltimore they rallied to take a two-game series from the
Orioles at the start of May, winning the second contest, 15-11, in 15
innings on a Martinez grand slam.

Martinez got out of his early season slump, and would finish the
season with 117 runs batted in. The pitching took flight, too. While
it appeared that David Cone would be out of the lineup for the
season--and maybe permanently--after a May 10 operation on an aneurysm
in his right arm, Gooden was discovering his former magic. He ran off
start after impressive start, recapturing his control and explosive
fastball. On May 14 he tossed a no-hitter against heavy-hitting
Seattle.

The trump card was the bullpen. Mariano Rivera and John Wetteland
shut the opposition down with 90-plus octane. Rivera was the true
Rajah of Relief. A wiry 168-pounder with a silky delivery, Rivera's
threw pitches that seemed to explode over the last five feet before
they got to the batter.

Torre saw that the job for Rivera was middle relief. Rivera
responded by toying with hitters, striking out 130 batters in 107
innings. At one point Minnesota manager Tom Kelly said, "We can't hit
him. He should be banned from baseball. He's illegal." Pettite, the
Yankees' best starter, was heading off any talk of a sophomore jinx on
his way to a 21-win season, the Yanks' first 20-game winner since Ron
Guidry 11 years before.

Middle infielders Jeter and Duncan were hitting far above anyone's
expectations and providing steady play in the field. Completing the
strength up the middle were catcher Girardi and center fielder Bernie
Williams. Girardi had been booed at the Yankees' February Fanfest. He
was replacing the popular, productive Mike Stanley, who signed with
Boston after the Yankees let him get away.

Torre wasn't worried about Girardi's hitting. "We wanted him to
catch," Torre says. "If you have great pitching you need someone to
catch. In my estimation he was the best catcher in the National
League. I checked with [pitching coach Mel] Stottlemyre and Zimmer and
they concurred. So I felt pretty good about it. Zimmer told me how
tough he was because he had managed him in 1989."

A late-June series at another homer paradise, in Cleveland, would
test the Yankees. Jacobs Field was a horsehide launching pad and
Albert Belle was the Indians' main wall-banger. But the Yankees swept
the four-game series, capping their visit by winning a day-night
doubleheader. If any baseball agnostics still remained in the Bronx,
their numbers were surely dwindling.

While a turning point for the Yankees, the Cleveland series will
always bring sadness to Torre. After the first game of a June 22
doubleheader, he was in the clubhouse when a call came from his wife,
Ali.

"My brother Frank was in the hospital at the time in Florida
because he wasn't feeling well," Torre remembers. "My wife says, 'Are
you sitting down?' Now right away my thoughts go to Frank. But she
says, 'Your brother Rocco died.' It knocked my socks off. He had a
heart attack. I talked to his wife, Rose, that day. She said he was
sitting there watching the first game and we were losing. And he was
complaining to her that we had never come from behind to win a game in
the ninth inning. And she said, 'There's always a first time.' And
then we came back and won the game. And then she went in to see what
he wanted to do about dinner and he just grabbed his head and
collapsed. He had diabetes and was 68 years old, but he was exercising
and doing things and had just been to the doctor and everything seemed
to be fine. I stayed for that night's game and part of the game on
Sunday, and then flew home to the wake on Sunday night and the funeral
on Monday. I put my cap and lineup cards of the game he saw in the
casket. It just made me feel closer."

Personal tragedy aside, if there was a time when Torre allowed
himself the thought that the Yankees might win it all, that was
it. "When we beat Cleveland in that doubleheader, it was really big."

The Yankees went into the All-Star break at 52-33, six games ahead
of Baltimore. After the 72-hour respite from planes, buses and hotels,
they traveled to Baltimore and swept the Birds again. "By the middle
of July, we had beaten Cleveland all six games in Cleveland and
Baltimore all six games in Baltimore," Torre marvels. "I think that at
that point my club had a great deal of confidence, knowing that if
they could beat those clubs on the road, we could do anything."

But there was no time to exhale. A baseball regular season is 162
games, practically as long as the National Basketball Association and
National Hockey League seasons combined. The season begins with
four-game weeks, then six-game weeks, and by the dog days of August
teams are playing every day.

On July 28 the Yankees' lead peaked at 12 games. But every great
drama includes conflict, and the Yankees would have to overcome
obstacles they didn't know about. It was a tribute to their depth that
they'd gotten over the loss of Cone, the right-hander whom they'd
signed to a three-year, $19.5 million deal. But now their starting
arms got heavy. Compounding the problems, Wetteland went down with a
groin injury on Aug. 16. Torre did the only thing he could do, moving
Rivera to the closing role. The starters were getting lit up, every
night it seemed, pounded for three and five and eight runs in the
early innings. Their most valuable commodity, Rivera, was wasted,
sitting with his arms folded and staring in from the bullpen
bench. The lead, once 12 games, tailed off to 10, then to 6.

Even some good deals they made--the Yanks picked up Darryl
Strawberry from the Northern League and got Cecil Fielder from the
Detroit Tigers for Ruben Sierra--didn't stop the bleeding. The game
has always been about pitching and if you don't have enough of it,
August will find you. After a loss to Seattle on Aug. 28, the lead was
just four games over Baltimore. What looked like a summer breeze was
turning into a fall to forget.

When he was a broadcaster with California, Torre remembers
visiting with Yankees manager Billy Martin during the game. "Billy had
a cigar going all the time. But he had it hidden. I mean, it wouldn't
be in the dugout, but in the runway. He'd get it off a shelf, puff it,
put it back, go back out to the dugout." Torre laughs. Did Torre think
of smoking between innings in the runway? "I probably would have
bitten it in half," he snaps.

But while a tension convention might have been building in the
clubhouse, the Yankees saw no fright in their skipper. "There are
times as a baseball person when you say, 'This is the day the food
table goes flying,'" says public relations director Cerrone. But with
Torre it never happened.

"To me the last thing you want to do is panic," Torre
says. "Because if the players sense that you're worried, they're going
to be worried. And I didn't want that to happen. It was a really tough
run."

Broadcaster Kay remembers the time well. "There was a palpable
sense of nervousness around, but nobody was panicking," he
recalls. "Torre called the team together and said, 'We are going to
win this, don't worry about it.' "

Says Torre, "The only thing we kept reminding ourselves is that we
were in better shape than anyone else. And they kept their heads. We
had enough veterans on the club and they didn't panic."

Then Charlie Hayes, acquired from Pittsburgh on Aug. 30, drove in
three runs the following day to help beat the California Angels. But a
bigger, more unexpected boost was coming. Nearly four months after his
arm operation, David Cone took the mound on Sept. 2 in Oakland and
silenced the Athletics' big bats, nearly pitching a no-hitter in a 5-0
victory. The Bronx Bombers' lead dwindled to two and a half games on
Sept. 10, but then the Yankees won five straight and split a crucial
four-game series against Baltimore at Yankee Stadium in
mid-September. They clinched the division title at home against the
Milwaukee Brewers on Sept. 25 and finished at 92-70, four games ahead
of Baltimore.

In the playoffs the wins seemed to come easier than in August and
September. The Yankees lost the first game to Western Division leader
Texas. But falling behind no longer scared the Yankees. They rallied
to win three consecutive games, including the last two in The Ballpark
in Arlington. Again, it was the Yankees' bullpen that triumphed while
the Rangers' pen surrendered leads in all three losses. Juan Gonzalez,
the league's most valuable player, had a stellar series, bombing five
homers.

Against Baltimore, the same lose-one-and-rally-later pattern
seemed about to emerge when the Yanks were saved by a 12-year-old boy
from New Jersey, Jeff Maier, who interfered with a fly ball in the
eighth inning of Game 1. Umpire Richie Garcia clearly missed the
interference and called it a home run. That tied the game at two and
Bernie Williams ended it in the 10th inning with a home run off of
Randy Myers. The Yankees lost Game 2, 5-3, and again had to go to the
opponent's park, having squandered their home-field advantage. But
again they swept the Orioles on their own turf.

In all, the Yankees had played nine games in Camden Yards and had
won every one. The Yankees shut down a team that had hit 251 homers
during the regular season, shattering the previous record of 240 set
by the 1961 Yankees. But against Yankees pitching the Baltimore bats
were strangely impotent, even in the close confines of Camden
Yards. One Baltimore beat writer labeled the Orioles "Tin Men,"
implying they lacked heart.